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Judge Napolitano and Fox News

Nelson Hultberg

March 30, 2017

On the 17th of this month, Judge Andrew Napolitano was dropped as an official commentator for Fox News and then quietly brought back twelve days later. His show, Freedom Watch, had ended in 2012 after a run of three years. It wasn’t renewed, which in my opinion was because Rupert Murdoch and the head honchos of Fox News felt very uncomfortable with his staunch “libertarian conservative” views on today’s politics.

Judge Napolitano, from the beginning in 2009, was a thorn in the overall ideological make-up of Fox. This is because Fox does not stand for freedom and strictly limited government. They merely stand for a “conservative mega-state” instead of a “liberal mega-state.”

What’s worse, Fox endorses the neo-conservatives’ drive for world hegemony. All their pundits mindlessly repeat the mantra that Putin’s Russia seized Crimea and is looking to now take over Europe. Actually Crimea voted democratically three years ago to return to Russia, and one year later they are overwhelmingly happier as part of the Russian Federation than they were as a province in Ukraine. Forbes Magazine reports in March of 2015:

“The U.S and European Union may want to save Crimeans from themselves. But the Crimeans are happy right where they are.

“One year after the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea, poll after poll shows that the locals there – be they Ukrainians, ethnic Russians or Tatars are mostly all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine.

“Little has changed over the last 12 months. Despite huge efforts on the part of Kiev, Brussels, Washington and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the bulk of humanity living on the Black Sea peninsula believe the referendum to secede from Ukraine was legit. At some point, the West will have to recognize Crimea’s right to self rule. Unless we are all to believe that the locals polled by Gallup and GfK were done so with FSB bogey men standing by with guns in their hands.

“In June 2014, a Gallup poll with the Broadcasting Board of Governors asked Crimeans if the results in the March 16, 2014 referendum to secede reflected the views of the people. A total of 82.8% of Crimeans said yes. When broken down by ethnicity, 93.6% of ethnic Russians said they believed the vote to secede was legitimate, while 68.4% of Ukrainians felt so. Moreover, when asked if joining Russia will ultimately make life better for them and their family, 73.9% said yes while 5.5% said no.”

The American media, under the sway of neoconservatism, refuse to accept the Crimean vote because they favor a hostile view of Russia [more on this shortly]. The majority of Crimeans (65%) speak Russian. Crimea had been part of Russia for over 200 years until Khrushchev made them part of Ukraine in 1954. Putin’s Russia wants peace with the West. The Cold War is over; but the neocons cannot face this fact.

Demonizing of Russia

Why do the neocons (and their support pundits at Fox) persist in demonizing Russia and Putin as a mortal threat to America? Because neoconservatives want the vast “military-industrial-security complex” to be preserved and expanded. It is a huge funnel for money and power to the Defense Department and the CIA-NSA bureaucracies (which they dominate and want to continue dominating). Lord Acton told us long ago about this terrible tendency of men in politics. “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

At the risk of hyperbole, the neocons are insane and are driving us toward WW III with Russia because they believe since we are the primary world superpower we must strive for hegemony over as much of the planet as possible. [See: The Neoconservative Threat to World Order, by Paul Craig Roberts and The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy, by Lieber and Press in Foreign Affairs.]

Washington’s neocons orchestrated the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratic government back in February of 2014 and put in place a regime that they are hoping will be favorable to allowing missiles to be placed in Ukraine and even up on Russia’s border. The neocon pundits (people such as Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, etc.) wish to restart the Cold War.

They dominate America’s foreign policy establishment and are obsessed with an aggressive supremacy over Russia rather than peaceful detente. Putin saw all this developing and, of course, could not allow for such an aggressive danger to Russia to stand. He had to defend himself, which he moved to do in 2014 by pressuring Crimea to vote up or down for rejoining the Russian Federation. Once Washington intervened in Kiev in the February 2014 coup, Putin realized that Crimea was in danger of being subsumed in NATO if it remained with Ukraine. Crimea is Russia’s only warm water port. Naturally Putin wanted it returned to Russia where it had been for 200 years.

Herein lies a major threat to the world. The neocons are driving us into war because of their lust for American hegemony and intervention into Russian territorial disputes in their own backyard. The answer is to make peace with Putin. End our aggressive actions in Ukraine (such as the overthrow of a duly elected government in Kiev back in 2014, our disingenuous distorting of the Crimea issue, and our attempts to put missiles up to the Russian border). As former Reagan budget director, David Stockman, points out so clearly in Christmas 2015: Why There Is No Peace on Earth:

“The current Ukrainian policy farce emanating from Washington is not only a reminder that the military-industrial-beltway complex is still alive and well, but also demonstrates why the forces of crony capitalism and money politics which sustain it are so lamentable. The fact is, the modern Warfare State has been the incubator of American imperialism since the Cold War, and is now proving itself utterly invulnerable to fiscal containment, even in the face of a $19 trillion national debt.

“So 101 years after the Christmas truces along the Western Front there is still no peace on earth. And the long suffering American taxpayers, who foot the massive bills generated by the Warfare State’s demented and destructive policies, have no clue that Imperial Washington is the principal reason.”

As Stockman has suggested, what needs to be done is for Trump to orchestrate a grand meeting between himself and Putin at Camp David and work out a New Détente with Moscow. Sure Putin is no democrat, but America deals with “non-democrats” all over the world in foreign policy matters. Nixon negotiated with Brezhnev over détente in 1972. And Trump could do the same. It would strike a stake into the vampire heart of the neocons and their hideous hegemonic foreign policy dreams.

Communism is dead. Russia is no longer an imperialistic nation. Putin actually wants to join the West. But the neocons in Washington insist on “demonizing” him because that is what will keep them in power and their ideology influential. They need to present some kind of terrible danger to the American people in order to continue to funnel billions into our bloated military budget and keep their dream of “world hegemony” alive. This is how all dictatorships develop. They demonize an alleged “horrendous enemy” to create enough fear among the people to justify their usurpation of rights and centralization of power in an omnipotent state.

Anyone who has read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four will remember Big Brother’s constant demonizing of Eurasia to the people of Oceania. “Perpetual war for perpetual peace,” is how Orwell described it. Well that is precisely what the neocons are doing to us today with their relentless demonizing of Putin and their obtuse demands for American hegemony throughout the world. For my analysis of the neocons, see my piece, The Neoconservatives: Tyranny’s Fifth Column.

Napolitano realizes all this because he is a true advocate of freedom. The pundits at Fox are not. They have drank the “kool-aid” of neoconservatism and are firmly in league with a Washington mega-state that seeks world supremacy rather than the traditional peaceful co-existence that wise geopolitical powers have sought throughout history. The neocons are bankrupting America and driving us to war with Russia. But Putin is not going to let them put missiles up to his borders. How would we like it if Russia was in Mexico doing to us what Washington is doing to them? Putin will react to defend himself. A horrific war is coming if the neocons continue to dominate our foreign policy.

What Is Trump’s Stand?

Does Trump realize this and see it this way? Apparently not. He has put in place neocons at the Department of Defense (headed by General James Mattis), and he has stated that he expects Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine. His choice of Tillerson at the State Department seemed at first a voice for sanity; but it appears that the power of the Deep State neocons at the Pentagon have brought both Trump and Tillerson into alignment with their hostile view of Russia. Thus the demonization of Russia by MSM is what most Americans continue to believe.

What’s important to grasp from all this is that Fox and the rest of MSM are moving us toward globalism, not Americanism. They want world hegemony for America. They are “neoconservative” and imperialistic, when what is needed is “libertarian conservatism” and a mind-our-own-business foreign policy to save America. I believe Judge Napolitano got axed by Fox as a commentator because he was too much of an opponent of globalism, too much of a critic of Fox’s imperialistic conservatism for them to tolerate him any longer. The Judge’s famous What If Speech on his Freedom Watch show back in 2012 laid the groundwork for his recent suspension on March 17, 2017.

Napolitano’s controversial reporting on a possible British connection to an Obama surveillance of Trump was merely the excuse to fire him. He lost favor with Murdoch’s neocons long ago, and they were looking for any excuse to rid themselves of his exuberant Americanism and attacks against Murdochian globalism. But evidently there was a huge protest from many patriots, which compelled Fox to reinstate the Judge to his role as commentator.

However there will always be an uncertain relationship between Fox and the Judge. Napolitano adamantly speaks the language of strict constitutionalism. This is not the language of Fox, nor the mindset of Murdoch and the men who run the network. They are men who have bought into the 20th century myths of Keynesian economics and Marxist politics. Mega-statism is their vision, not that of America’s Founders. The Deep State has its grip firmly on Murdoch, and he is not astute enough historically or philosophically to grasp the big ideological picture that is sweeping America and the West into a tyrannical globalism. He is a corporate mind. History and philosophy hold no lure for him. Thus America suffers, liberty falters, and the Orwellians in Washington advance.